Real-time multimedia conferencing applications are afflicted by severe degradations when packet losses occur over a communication network. Two general approaches used to recover from such packet losses are (1) retransmission-based approaches, and (2) forward error correction (FEC) approaches. Retransmission-based approaches, such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), lead to a packet loss recovery delay that is greater than the round-trip delay of the system, which is unacceptably large in some use cases. Therefore, conferencing applications focus on using FEC codes for recovering from packet losses. One type of generalized FEC code has the property of a low recovery delay (i.e., decoding delay) from one or two packet losses, but also has a disadvantageously long recovery delay from a block or burst of packet losses. Another type of FEC code yields a low recovery delay from a burst of packet losses, but has a disadvantageously long recovery delay from only one or two packet losses.